


A Gold Star for Yaz

by Papapaldi



Series: Series 12 [3]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/F, Post-Praxeus, author tries to explain why the fam travel in real time, bit of Hurt/Comfort, in which Yaz is Clara, or maybe more like canon-compliant thasmin, soft angst, thasmin, which is to say tension without resolution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-03
Updated: 2020-02-03
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:47:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22543495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Papapaldi/pseuds/Papapaldi
Summary: “What you did today –”was brilliant,Yaz hoped she'd say,PC Khan, saving the world.And then she would smile, maybe sit down on the bed, flopping back with loose limbs and bright eyes. “– it was reckless.” She looked at Yaz, eyes so sharp and steely it was almost a glare. Resolutely, the Doctor in reality refused to act like the one inside Yaz’s head. Bit rude of her, really.The Doctor is worried about Yaz's reckless behaviour. Yaz just wants things to be the way they were, and she never wants them to stop.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor & Yasmin Khan, Thirteenth Doctor/Yasmin Khan
Series: Series 12 [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1647982
Comments: 22
Kudos: 162





	A Gold Star for Yaz

**Author's Note:**

> Praxeus finally gave us some good Yaz development! So desperate for the Doctor's attention that she's getting reckless, becoming more like 13 (didn't land inside an active volcano – result!) mark me down as scared (and horny, bc tbh Mandip is gorgeous)

A knock at the door. Yaz looked up from where she was sitting – her bedroom in the TARDIS, catching her breath. Smiling. Despite the chaos of an alien pathogen threatening to wipe out all of humanity, it had been a good day. A really good day. 

“Yaz,” the Doctor’s voice called from the other side of the door, “can I talk to you for a minute?” A really,  _ really _ good day. 

“Yeah sure,” she replied, grinning. Her jacket was draped across her bed, smelling like a garbage dump. The fabric was signed with the tingling, electric aura that came with a trip through an alien teleport bay, along with the stench of fizzling engines that came with operating broken spaceships. Both were smells she could recognise by now, which was almost as alarming as it was cool. Almost. It was pretty cool. 

The Doctor pushed open the door to Yaz’s room. All of them – Ryan, Graham, and Yaz – had their own rooms on the TARDIS, crafted (the Doctor said) by analysing their psychic waveforms to construct the perfect retreat. It was unclear whether or not the Doctor had a room, or whether she ever retreated at all, but questions weren’t exactly her area, and Yaz wasn’t about to ruin the Doctor’s mood. It could change fast. 

When the Doctor entered, the easy smile stretching across Yaz’s face faltered; the Doctor looked troubled. It wasn’t that she was never troubled – lately, she looked troubled almost all the time – but today had been different. Distracting.  _ Good.  _ So the worry stitched through her hunched shoulders, the tight-pressed grim line of her mouth, the dark and distant eyes – it didn’t make sense. 

“You alright?” Yaz asked. 

“Oh, yeah, fine,” the Doctor chirped. High and false. Forced. “Yeah, fine,” she echoed, quieter. 

“What d’ya want to talk about?” She held out hope that the conversation was going to be what she’d expected. Something nice, like a gold star.  _ You were brilliant today Yaz,  _ she imagined her saying,  _ saved the world, you did – couldn’t have done it without you.  _ It was the sort of thing the Doctor used to say all the time, but lately, she’d been preoccupied. Looking for the Master, apparently – though Yaz, Graham, and Ryan still hadn’t been able to figure out why. If he was trapped in the dark, then he deserved every second of it. Today had felt like old times; all smiles and gold stars and banter. 

The Doctor sighed, preemptively exhausted. She didn’t sit down on the bed where Yaz was perched, despite Yaz making a show of shoving over to make room. The Doctor just stood, hunched, hands clasped behind her back. “It’s about you, actually.” 

_ And how great I was?  _ she wanted to say. “What about me?” she asked instead. 

“What you did today –”  _ was brilliant,  _ Yaz hoped,  _ PC Khan, saving the world.  _ And then she would smile, maybe sit down on the bed, flopping back with loose limbs and bright eyes. “– it was reckless.” She looked at Yaz, eyes so sharp and steely it was almost a glare. Resolutely, the Doctor in reality refused to act like the one inside Yaz’s head. Bit rude of her, really. 

Yaz felt the ghost of a grin slide from her face completely. Dropped to the ground between them, like a gauntlet. Yaz loved a challenge. “I found the ship that was spreading Praxeus across the world. If I hadn’t found it then we never would’ve–”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t helpful,” the Doctor interjected, still standing. She felt like a kid receiving a lecture as the Doctor paced, lording. “You saved the world, you really did. As always, you were brilliant – but it could’ve gone wrong.” 

She’d said the words Yaz wanted to hear, but the sound of them was almost worse than not hearing them at all. The words were tacked on without their usual vigor, something rehearsed, something the Doctor knew she had to say to appease her. Yaz raised her eyebrows mutinously; “are you telling me off?”  _ Really,  _ she almost said, almost crossed her arms. Almost got proper angry, like the Doctor had been of late. Yaz could do mardy, too. She could do short-tempered. 

“No,” the Doctor amended hastily. Yaz accentuated her raised brow, communicating as much disbelief as she could with expression alone. “I’m not,” she assured, “I’m just saying, you shouldn’t have used that teleporter in the warehouse.” 

“I was just trying to help. You said one hour, what was I supposed to do? Just stand around waiting?” It wasn’t not the sort of thing she did, not the sort of thing the Doctor did either. 

“You should have asked me first.”

“You were busy.” 

“Yaz, you could’ve ended up anywhere,” she pressed, hands raised and strained in an accentuating gesture. “Anywhere at all – I mean, did you even think?” She wasn’t enjoying this – who would? – but Yaz, especially, wasn’t enjoying it. She was a by-the-book sort of person – tellings off weren’t something that happened to her. “I mean, there could’ve been no air, it could’ve been full of hostile aliens. You can’t just do things like that with no plan, no idea.”

Yaz frowned, and it came dangerously close to a petulant pout. “You do,” she said. “If it’d been you, you would’ve gone for it. You wouldn’t have waited, or asked, or assessed. You’re never afraid.” 

The Doctor looked down at her, stern, guardian-like. “You’re not me.” 

“I’m just livin’ up to your example,” she said, defensively. Frustrated. “Tryin’ to do what you would do – be brave, be smart,” she reeled– and before she could stop herself – “be incredible.”

Something softened in the Doctor’s expression, but it was stuffed down and stonified in less than a moment. Guarded, but still kind. Fair behind the stern. “I know,” she admitted, avoiding Yaz’s eyes. “That’s the problem, you can’t be.” 

“Why not?” she huffed, “I not good enough? I took a risk and it paid off. What’s wrong with that?” 

“Because it won’t always pay off. Things go wrong. I’m experienced, I can get myself out of a jam –”

“What, and I can’t?”

“No, you can’t,” she snapped – a bit cruel. Not fully directed at Yaz, she knew, because the Doctor seemed to get angry at just about anything these days. All of them, treading on eggshells around her. Today was better, today was good. Until now. 

Yaz took a deep breath, keeping her anger under control. She was good at being calm, usually. She was good at making others calm too, diffusing the situation. The Doctor looked sorry, in the way she was shifting on her feet, casting Yaz quiet, sorrowful looks. She didn’t say it, though, which meant it didn’t count at all. The Doctor looked a lot of things, but she never said any of them. “I was just trying to be useful.” Yaz murmured, trying not to sound wounded. She felt wounded, though, with a healthy side of indignant. Just yesterday the Doctor had snapped at her – said she asked too many questions. Usually, it was a quality the Doctor complimented her on, asking good questions. The right questions. She liked it, unless, of course, they were directed at her. 

“You don’t have to try and impress me, Yaz,” the Doctor replied, quiet. Her gaze was no longer looming or overbearing, just kind. Quieter, she muttered; “you already do.” 

Yaz picked a piece of that smile up off the floor, let it curl her lip and brighten her eyes, just a little. “Of course I want to impress you. You’re the best person ever.” And she cared about the points, the gold stars, because they were the Doctor’s way of saying she appreciated them, that they’d done good. It was a privilege, travelling with her, and lately they’d all been a bit afraid that she was going to drop them back home and leave. Forget about them. It had certainly felt that way in Gloucester, where she’d just got up and left them to wile away the rest of the day. Left Graham behind without even knowing he was safe, left Ryan and Yaz with a horde of trigger-happy judoon. It wasn’t like her – none of this was anything like her. But, then again, hadn’t she said, staring up at them with those cold, rattled eyes;  _ you don’t know me, not even a little bit.  _ She cared about the gold stars, now more than ever, because they meant things were back on track. “I don’t just want to be the person you drag around and show places. I don’t just want to sit back and do what I’m told. I want to do something –”  _ Something more,  _ her own voice echoed. She didn’t want to be some passenger, she was good for more than that. She owed the universe and it owed her back – she’d give more if she could see more. It was an exchange. “I want to make you proud.” 

The Doctor smiled. Not her usual one; spread, bright, almost unhinged. It was sadder, smaller. “Make me proud by staying alive, then – yeah?” 

“I’ll try,” Yaz grinned. The Doctor finally let herself unspool from her tightly-wound state, one coil at a time. She grinned back, and sat on the edge of Yaz’s bed. Not quite close enough to touch – touch wasn’t something the Doctor did all that often, and especially not these days – but close enough for the fibres of their clothes to stand up, almost to attract, in the small space between them. 

After a while, the Doctor said; “you’re gonna make a great police officer, Yaz.”

Her stomach plummeted – which told her a lot about her true feelings on the subject. She liked to pretend that she was finding it difficult to choose between holding off on her career and travelling with the Doctor, but she wasn’t. The choice wasn’t difficult at all. “Yeah,” she acknowledged. What was the point of breaking up bar fights and sorting out parking disputes when she could be saving whole planets, discovering new worlds? What was the point of morning coffee and evening telly and going out with your mates to the pub on Saturday if you could be doing and seeing the entire universe? Maybe the Doctor was trying to get her to admit something, to give her some security, to say she’d stay, no matter what.  _ I’m with you,  _ another moment echoed. “People have travelled with you before, right?” she asked, wary, because the Doctor never liked questions about her past. It was something she and the boys had learnt to avoid entirely, until the Doctor had become so quiet and closed-off that they felt they didn’t have a choice. “Did they really just leave? How could they ever have enough of the universe?”  _ Enough of you?  _

The Doctor took a moment to respond, mulling it over, twisting the question between fidgeting fingers. She was curled over, one forearm resting on her thigh, loose hand and trailing fingers hanging in between her legs, knees stuck at jagged angles, gaze trained forward and far away. “Because they found somewhere they belonged.” A wistful smile tugged at her thin lips. “Wasn’t always on this planet or in this time-zone, mind – lots of worlds to choose from out there in the universe. Sometimes they found love, a life, a family they had to care for. You’ll find that someday too, Yaz.” She sighed, and in an instant, she stopped being the person giving comfort and started being the person in need of it. She looked lonely, like she had as she’d dropped them home outside Park Hill for the first time, ready to go back out into that wide universe, alone. She murmured; “everyone does.” 

Yaz felt the need to lighten the mood. She was good at that, too, it came with diffusing the situation. Same skill set. A well-placed bright smile, a warm, encouraging word. The right sort of joke. “I sort of want this sabbatical to last forever.” Or an admission of something personal, vulnerable. With the Doctor, it was never exactly a fair exchange when it came to vulnerability. You never got as much as you gave, not even close. It’s why the three of them tended to turn to each other instead. 

“Nothing lasts forever.” A voice like a breeze; thin, rustling, wavering. Her gaze was the same in the way it shifted in the light, gazing into it was like watching moments flicker by on a screen, too quick to catch. Something was there, though, something vulnerable. 

For once, Yaz was the one scared off by it. “Why can’t we just run off?” she tried, plastering on a lazy grin. “Why all these secondments and sabbaticals – this is a time machine?”  _ Why do I have to go back? _ Her eager eyes asked, as the Doctor met them. 

The Doctor nodded, as if to convince herself, as she said, “you’ve got to have a life, something tying you down. A home.” She choked on the word, as if it were stuck in her throat. In her eyes, Yaz could’ve sworn she saw a flash of fire. She righted herself with a subtle cough, as if she’d just sucked in a breath too fast. “That’s important. I don’t want you to lose that. People notice when you’re gone, even if to them it only takes five minutes. People are more observant than you think.” She pulled her arm off her thigh and sat up, reaching a hand to massage the back of her neck, unknotting the stitches there. “You’ll start forgetting things, your priorities slipping, relationships deteriorating – I’ve seen it before. Soon enough, you’re aging fast, your life’s slipping away, and you’re keeping people out because they ask too many questions and I’m just this…” her voice grew quieter, words more rapid by the moment. “I’m just this stranger in your life. Getting in the middle of it. Ruining it, maybe. Like a constant, standing in the middle of it all while everything else tries to settle around me.” Her words conjured an image in Yaz’s mind; a lone figure trudging through a field of mud as it dried in the sun. Difficult to wade through, more difficult by the second, but the figure managed, until the mud was like rock that cracked and shattered with every step. A lone figure, walking through the lives of others. 

“You could never ruin my life – not anyone’s,” Yaz assured her. Yaz’s words pulled the Doctor back over the cliff side. She blinked, bleary, as if disoriented. There was a deep sincerity in her tone that made the Doctor shudder. 

“The fact remains,” she coughed, “you need balance. Humans are all about balance. Work-life balance, life-me balance. You know, pick up a hobby.”

Yaz smiled, again, diffusing the situation. “Don’t worry, I’ve already got a hobby,” in her pause for breath the Doctor turned to look at her with a tremor in her face, as if she’d seen a ghost. “– it’s you, by the way,” Yaz nudged her playfully. 

The Doctor shrunk back, hunch-backed. Retreating. “That’s not what I meant.” 

“I know,” she said, an apology that was half a laugh. “I’m just kidding. What do you expect me to take up in my spare time – knitting? Scrap-booking?” She chuckled. 

“Nothing wrong with those,” she exclaimed, affronted. “I’ve spent quite a lot of time doing both. You know, human things. They’re good for you.”

Yaz wrinkled her nose. Human things. Normal things. She’d never been a fan of those. “You can’t be serious,” she said, eyebrows raised. 

“Guess I’m not,” the Doctor shrugged, her gaze wandering across the ceiling and its lattice of hexagonal lights. “All I’m saying is, be careful.”

“You’re never careful,” Yaz snorted. 

“I don’t have to be!” she exclaimed, and at the sight of Yaz’s pointed look added, “I don’t, I’m just… I’m not as breakable as you.” She said it quietly, an echo of something older in her face. Sometimes Yaz noticed it, that age, and wondered how she had never spotted it before. 

Yaz smirked, “you sayin’ I’m fragile?”

“Relatively speaking, very.” A smile spread across the Doctor’s face, one of the good ones; bright, instead of sad. 

A pause. They sat beside one another, the Doctor looking up, lost in thought, and Yaz, straight-backed and knocked-kneed, bursting to say something. Wanting to hear something. Wanting the conversation to keep going, along with the running, and the travelling. Everything that came with knowing the Doctor. Most of all she wanted to know; “I did good, though, right?” she blurted. Yaz didn’t look around, but she felt the Doctor shift as she lowered her head from its place in the sky. “Today was good.” 

“Yaz –“

“Aw, come on, I was good, wasn’t I?” she nudged the Doctor again, which might have been a mistake, given how touchy she was at the moment. “Why can’t you just say I was good?” 

In the following silence, Yaz’s face fell, and the Doctor stared downwards as if watching it go. “You just remind me of someone, that’s all.”

Yaz smiled, “thousands of years of travelling, be a bit weird if I didn’t.”

“Yeah,” she returned, “I suppose.” 

Yaz bounced her knees, the Doctor laced and unlaced her fingers – both of the restless. Both of them silent. 

“Well,” the Doctor said as she stood up, turning to face her. “That’s all I wanted to say.”

“Oh,” Yaz replied, trying to mask her disappointment, “okay.” What exactly had she been hoping for – that the Doctor would finally spill the secrets that had her wound so tight, stuck so cold? Maybe, if days like this one kept happening – with the gold stars and the banter and the last minute rescues – she would. By the time Yaz’s final word rung out into silence, the Doctor was already gone. 

**Author's Note:**

> Might continue this if we get more Yaz development next week with the whole 'worst fears' thing. I feel like maybe Yaz's worst fear is being left back home and the Doctor never coming back :0 don't know if they'll do that but :))) would make for some tasty angst. I feel like Yaz won't ever want to go back to being a police officer so I wonder if that is the 'secret' she's hiding (according to Mandip, who might have us all clowning, who knows)
> 
> I almost did a bit from the Doctor's perspective about the life ruining she's done by taking people travelling (Rose, Martha, the Ponds, and Clara) but y'all already know about that.


End file.
